Tomodachi Life is compatible with Citra. The game will boot and run, with minor stuttering in some segments. So far the Mii's dialogue cuts short and skips to the next line. A tomodachi life game on the switch (sequel, port, remake, etc.) would be awesome, but there’s the inevitable question: how would tomodachi life work without two screens? I’m sure if nintendo thought about a tomodachi life 2, they would have to get through that hurdle first. Tomodachi Life, known in South Korea as Friend Gathering Apartment, is a Nintendo 3DS game and sequel to the Japan-only hit, Tomodachi Collection. Tomodachi Life was released in June 6th, 2014. In this game, you create Miis and set them on to their new life. They do a massive variety of activities including, befriending, fighting, dating and even marriage that leads to a child. The characters.

As a grown-up, it’s hard to commit to a game like Tomodachi Life. Nintendo’s latest life-sim game for the 3DS is a hands-off, no-action experience that asks players to pop in and out of the game briefly and frequently. It hinges on weird skits and childish writing, and it wrests a lot of control away from players who might expect to sink time into exploration and tinkering with a slew of virtual characters.

Games like this can do quite well, of course. But Tomodachi Life's best qualities—quick-burst play, cutesy situations, touchscreen controls, camera integration, social-media tie-ins—are the stuff you’d be more likely to find in a cheap smartphone game, one that you can pull out of your pocket randomly to enjoy for a few minutes before getting on with your day.

Nintendo spent a ton of effort translating this odd game for an international audience—and thereby bucking our collective annoyance at the company’s case of sequelitis—which makes this title a welcome breath of fresh 3DS air (and an easy recommendation for tweens). But in spite of a slew of scripted content and an evident helping of Nintendo quality control, this game is not worth both the price and the requirement of lugging a 3DS around.

Window dressing

Tomodachi Life drops players onto a sunny, tropical island (if you’re keeping score, Nintendo historians, this isn’t Wuhu Island from various Wii and 3DS games) that, for whatever reason, contains only one apartment complex, and an empty one at that. You’re asked to fill the first unit with your personal virtual likeness, either taken from your 3DS’ primary “Mii” character or created on the spot.

After fake-you moves into a small room, you can add up to 99 more occupants, and you’ll want to add at least ten Miis to unlock many of the island’s attractions. Once you’ve filled enough vacancies, the dollhouse comes to life, and your denizens will begin nagging you for food, clothes, entertainment, and more. You’ll accumulate cash and rare items by catering to their every whim, forming the game’s basic feedback loop: Resident wants something; you buy said item at a shop on the island (if you don’t have it already); resident responds by gaining “happiness” points (which unlock certain items) and giving you in-game cash.

That means you’ll spend most of the game glancing at the apartment’s windows, which give hints about which residents are in need of something, then tapping and assisting. Pretty quickly, their needs go beyond material items. Sometimes, they’ll invite you to play dinky mini-games: you can play a matching card game, tap the screen like mad to knock an opponent’s toy over, play a simplified JRPG, or guess what a super-zoomed photo is displaying. Other times, residents will seek your advice and start prodding you about becoming friends—or more than friends.

The rest of the island is made up of quirky moments that your Miis are inserted into, as if Nintendo wrote up a kid-friendly sketch comedy show while dropping acid. Instead of jokes and punchlines, your characters get into awkward situations, like PG-rated rap battles, Twin Peaks-style dream sequences, or standing around a barbecue and commenting frequently about the meat (all while speaking with synthesized voices that actually handle a giant range of English words quite well).

There’s a certain age range that this content seems written for, and we at Ars feel squarely aged out of it. More importantly, these zany activities rarely dole out cash or points; if you go to the beach or the lookout point and hang out with a Mii there, he or she won’t react giddily like a virtual pet. You’re just hanging out with Nintendo’s so-so writing at that point.

Exploiting your friends

Comparisons to Nintendo’s Animal Crossing series—another cutesy, written-for-kids life-sim with little in the way of endgame—crumble pretty quickly upon closer examination. Tomodachi relies almost entirely on the touchscreen for control, and you don’t control characters directly. In fact, you rarely get to customize or rearrange anything in the apartments or on the island, and there’s nothing in the way of Animal Crossing-esque discovery or exploration. Tap to warp to different spots on the island, then talk, shop, watch, and repeat.

You might expect to export your 3DS online friend list or Miiverse roster to fill out the apartment building, but for whatever reason, Tomodachi doesn’t support such automation. If you want to export characters online, you’ll have to create a QR code within the game, then send that code to your friends. Otherwise, you’ll have to meet your friends in person to wirelessly transfer your Miis, so unless you already have Miis loaded in your 3DS’ Mii Maker, you’ll have to build island residents from scratch.

The way the game plays, you’ll want to go to the trouble of making personalized residents. I used that QR code functionality to import a random person online, and I had a lot less patience for his neediness and requests than I did for people who resembled celebrities or my friends. In real life, I’d hang out with friends while tapping away in a brief session and mention whatever weird activities “they” had been up to, and we’d laugh while I held the 3DS up.

Oh, and we used the Y and X buttons to capture screenshots. That’s probably the coolest part of Tomodachi, by the way: the ability to take screenshots at any time and then upload them through Nintendo’s admittedly clunky social media sharing service. One friend rode another friend as a horse in a dream sequence—saved and sent. Same when actress Kristen Bell turned my good friend down for a date, or when my friends were backup dancers for my singing performance at a giant music hall.

Ars has recently reported on Nintendo’s choice not to support same-sex romance in the game, along with the company’s official response—namely, that such a thing would be too difficult to patch into the game at this point. While such a change does seem pretty steep to pull off with final, retail code, after playing the game for a while, I’m shocked that Nintendo never considered the issue during the design process.

The game wants so badly for players to empathize with the apartment’s residents, particularly in crafting their personalities (quirky, reserved, polite, etc.) during character creation, and it also makes sure to accelerate the romance process when a new character is marked as a “spouse” in relation to the game’s “primary” Mii. Tomodachi Life also awards happiness points for relationships, marriages, and having children, and it smothers characters in unhappy rain clouds when their strides fail.

In short, this isn’t optional, easy-to-ignore content. If you’re gay, Tomodachi will reinforce feelings of exclusion regularly. And if you find that criticism irrelevant, consider how much of the game hinges on you investing personally into its content. When bizarre dreams happen, or Miis gather for a Frisbee match, or residents rip into karaoke songs, you don’t accrue money or points or any other “useful” stuff. Instead, you attach those moments to the real people the Miis have been modeled on.

Tomodachi is most successful, most amusing, and most striking when it exploits your friendships and relationships—when you feel compelled to capture and share a screenshot of your brother and your childhood friend throwing trash at each other while fighting over a teddy bear. It would be a brilliant social smartphone game to pull up in incredibly brief, few-times-a-day sessions, a feeling reinforced by the fact that the game uses no traditional buttons.

It would also be an easy port, at least on a technical level, but Nintendo will need to overcome its aversion to smartphones before Tomodachi Life reaches its ideal platform.

The good

• Goofy situations tend to be hilarious when real-life friends are involved
• Screenshot tool works wonderfully with social media sharing options

The bad

• Tween-targeted writing makes many of the skits and situations not stand up on their own
• Wimpy mini-game selection
• No opportunities for exploration on tiny island

The ugly

• Neither of the 3DS' friend-list options work for importing friends

Verdict: Try it if you're a tween (or a tween-at-heart). Otherwise, avoid it.